By Dr. Soraya Min, Department of Postmaterial Studies, Worcester University for the Handbook of Lesser-Known Artists

Few contemporary artists have so perplexed critics,and delighted bioengineers,as Henri Velasquez (b. 1979, Montevideo, Uruguay). Operating at the intersection of sensory art, and post-anthropocentric aesthetics, Velasquez is best known for pioneering the genre of gelatin-based spatial installation, or what he coined “hydrocolloid sculpture.”

His primary medium? Unflavored, food-grade gelatin,used not as a vehicle for nostalgia or irony, but as a serious, if wobbly, inquiry into memory, decay, and perception.

In a contemporary art world saturated with archival anxiety and digital preservation, Velasquez has built a body of work around impermanence.

Origins: The Viscous Turn

Velasquez began as a classically trained sculptor at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay but quickly grew disenchanted with the fetishization of permanence. After a formative period working in a biochemistry lab (as a janitor, not a technician), he became obsessed with physical states between liquid and solid. He would later describe gelatin as “the metaphysical compromise between ambition and collapse.”

His earliest gelatin works were unsanctioned: slabs of red gelatin cast inside urinals, in subway turnstiles, and,infamously,on the keyboard of a harpsichord thought to have been played by Mozart in Vienna.

These early acts, both anarchic and tender, became known as Los Blandos (“The Softs”), and positioned him as a fringe trickster in Latin American conceptual circles.

Medium: Gelatin as Metaphor and Material

To Velasquez, gelatin is not just a visual medium,it is tactile, sonic, and profoundly temporal. “It sweats. It sighs. It forgets itself,” he wrote in his notes for the GEL™ Symposium (Lisbon, 2012). He is known to cast large-scale works,entire rooms, staircases, chandeliers,out of molded gelatin that visibly degrades throughout the course of an exhibition.

The gelatin is always unflavored, untinted. “Color distracts. Flavors beg. I need my material to behave like fog: present but without demands.”

Temperature is an essential element in his installations. Many are displayed in carefully climate-controlled spaces, while others are deliberately left to melt. Some include audience interaction: visitors must walk barefoot through gelatin fields, sit in soft chairs that deform beneath them, or whisper into congealed microphones that no longer transmit sound.

Notable Works and Exhibitions

• “Memory Is a Tremble” (2014, Reina Sofía, Madrid):

A 9-meter table covered in hundreds of gelatin castings of family heirlooms,tools, dolls, medals,that gradually collapsed over a 3-week period under soft UV lighting.

• “Orthogonal Collapse” (2017, Venice Biennale):

An entire room constructed of gelatin-based bricks, stacked meticulously into classical architectural motifs. On opening day, the ambient heat began to soften the walls, and by the end of the exhibition, the room had partially fallen in on itself.

• “Index of Softness” (2020, MoMA PS1, New York):

Visitors were invited to press their forearms into a wall of warm gelatin and leave imprints that faded over hours. The artist referred to this as a “tactile census of impermanence.”

The Gelation Schism

Velasquez’s practice has not been without its critics,or fractures. In 2019, he was publicly accused by a former assistant, conceptual chef Nadya Lemcke, of “monopolizing the metaphors of softness.” Their collaborative project Edible Echoes (which involved visitors eating gelatin castings of musical instruments) was later disavowed by both parties.

Since then, Velasquez has been more reclusive, but not less ambitious. In 2023, he was reportedly working with a group of structural engineers to build a gelatin tower 100 metres high in the Andes, designed to last exactly one month.

Critical Reception and Legacy

To some, Velasquez is a charlatan,a jester in an apron, stirring nonsense in a bowl. But to others, he is one of the most radically embodied thinkers in contemporary art. His work speaks to ecological fragility, cultural amnesia, and the failure of language in the face of entropy.

His writings, collected in the volume Notes Toward a Theory of Wobble (2021), have been widely cited by theorists of new materialism and posthuman phenomenology.

Art historian Camila Dror described his practice best:

“Velasquez is the only artist I know who takes impermanence seriously, but not solemnly. He invites us to laugh at our own desire to last.”

Final Thoughts: On the Verge of Collapse

As of writing, Henri Velasquez continues to work in a refrigerated studio outside Montevideo. He refuses to preserve any of his sculptures beyond their exhibition dates. “To refrigerate is to deny time,” he told a Spanish interviewer. “Let the jelly die.”

His rumored next project? A symphony for gelatin titled Concerto for Collapse,a performance piece where deep bass frequencies slowly liquefy an orchestra of moulded instruments.

“If marble is how a culture boasts,” Velasquez once said, “gelatin is how it confesses.”

From the upcoming Handbook of Lesser-known Artists

In an age where sound art is often reduced to ambient noise or immersive spectacle, Henri Pagnol (b. 1955, Marseille) has pursued a path so peculiar that even seasoned curators admit they have difficulty explaining it to audiences without provoking laughter.

Pagnol’s chosen medium is whisper erosion,the slow physical wear of objects caused by the repeated act of talking or whispering onto their surfaces. His practice, which spans five decades, is not merely about sound, but about its erosive touch.

Over the years, he has “carved” marble blocks, dulled polished copper, and even altered antique mirrors,not with tools, but with years of murmured breath.

Origins: Silence as a Chisel

The story of Pagnol’s medium begins in 1978 when, as a bored apprentice in a restoration workshop, he leaned close to an ancient limestone frieze and daily recited Rimbaud into it. Months later, he claimed to notice a subtle pitting on the stone surface, which he attributed not to dust or age, but to the soft abrasion of moisture-laden breath.

Convinced he had stumbled onto a form of “sonic sculpture,” Pagnol began methodically whispering into stones, metals, and glass. The work was excruciatingly slow,sometimes requiring years before any visible change occurred.

“I am not carving an object,” he told an early interviewer, “I am persuading it to change.”

Method: The Breath as Tool

Pagnol’s studio looks less like an atelier than a confessional. Objects rest on pedestals at mouth height. A small metronome marks his whispering pace. The artist wears no mask; moisture is essential. His whispered texts are often poems, political manifestos, or strings of nonsense syllables, chosen for the shape they give the lips and the warmth of exhalation.

He considers each project a duet: the object’s molecular resistance versus the persistence of his murmurs. For a large marble piece, he might spend eight hours a day over a decade, slowly coaxing its surface into a new topography.

Notable Works and Exhibitions

• “Le Faible Marteau” (The Weak Hammer), 1989, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris:

A copper plate displayed alongside an audio recording of ten years’ worth of whispered texts that had gradually dulled its mirror finish into a soft matte haze. Visitors could lean close to see faint lip-shaped depressions.

• “La Chambre des Sibilances” (Room of Sibilance), 2003, Venice Biennale:

A darkened chamber containing twenty antique mirrors, each partially clouded by years of whispered recitations of extinct bird names. Attendees reported a “palpable quiet pressure” in the room.

• “Erosion No. 47” (2016, Kyoto Art Center):

A limestone sphere, once perfectly smooth, subtly hollowed on one side after twenty-three years of daily whispering the alphabet in French.

Falling Out: The Whisper Schism

In the mid-2000s, Pagnol became associated with a younger group of “sonic sculptors” who experimented with directed breath and vocal resonance to shape malleable materials. The collaboration, however, collapsed in 2008 after a public dispute in Berlin over whether recorded whispers,played through hidden speakers,could be considered equivalent to live human breath.

Pagnol declared recordings “dead breath” and left the group. “An object will only yield to breath that has crossed the beating heart,” he wrote.

The Living Artifact

Pagnol refuses to sell his works, arguing that their “erosion is unfinished” until he dies. Many institutions host his pieces on indefinite loan, with the condition that the artist must have access to continue whispering into them. The Louvre reportedly employs a dedicated staffer to unlock a gallery after hours for his murmured maintenance sessions.

His works are not fixed; they are mid-transformation, as if perpetually listening. This presents museums with a curatorial paradox: the objects degrade over time, yet their value lies in that degradation.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Some critics dismiss Pagnol as a performance artist indulging in pseudo-science; others regard him as one of the purest material poets of his generation. The late curator Sophie Daumas famously said, “Pagnol doesn’t sculpt objects,he sculpts patience.”

Younger conceptualists exploring “slow art” and “imperceptible change” often cite him as a pioneer. Philosophers of material culture have drawn parallels between his work and glacial erosion, coral growth, and even political change through persistent dissent.

Final Thoughts: The Whisper as Monument

Now in his seventies, Pagnol continues to work in a small, humid studio in Marseille. He is rumored to be undertaking his most ambitious project yet: whispering into a block of Carrara marble for the remainder of his life, intending it to be displayed only posthumously.

In a rare 2024 interview, when asked if he feared the work might never be “finished,” he smiled and replied:

“The whisper is never finished. The marble is only pretending to resist.”